The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows
O’er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes
Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring
Faints in the heart of Summer’s earliest rose.Dimpling the meadow’s grassy green and grey,
By furze that yellows all the common way,
Gathering the gladness of the common broom,
And too persistent fragrance of the may—Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear,
The wandering wind has passed away from here,
Has passed to where within your garden waits
The concentrated sweetness of the year.
But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts. Her work is too rich and too full for that.
Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable. His Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the author of The Scarlet Letter. The combination is not very satisfactory, but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest. Mr. Foster seems to be quite popular in America. The Chicago Times finds his fancies ‘very playful and sunny,’ and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of his ‘tender and appreciative style.’ He is certainly a clever story-teller, and The Noah’s Ark (which ‘somehow had escaped the sheriff’s hand’) is bright and amusing, and its pathos, like the pathos of a melodrama, is a purely picturesque element not intended to be taken too seriously. We cannot, however, recommend the definitely comic poems. They are very depressing.
Mr. John Renton Denning dedicates his book to the Duke of Connaught, who is Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade, in which regiment Mr. Denning was once himself a private soldier. His poems show an ardent love of Keats and a profligate luxuriance of adjectives:
And I will build a bower for thee, sweet,
A verdurous shelter from the noonday heat,
Thick rustling ivy, broad and green, and shining,
With honeysuckle creeping up and twining
Its nectared sweetness round thee; violets
And daisies with their fringèd coronets
And the white bells of tiny valley lilies,
And golden-leaved narcissi—daffodillies
Shall grow around thy dwelling—luscious fare
Of fruit on which the sun has laughed;
this is the immature manner of Endymion with a vengeance and is not to be encouraged. Still, Mr. Denning is not always so anxious to reproduce the faults of his master. Sometimes he writes with wonderful grace and charm. Sylvia, for instance, is an exceedingly pretty poem, and The Exile has many powerful and picturesque lines. Mr. Denning should make a selection of his poems and publish them in better type and on better paper. The ‘get-up’ of his volume, to use the slang phrase of our young poets, is very bad indeed, and reflects no credit on the press of the Education Society of Bombay.
The best poem in Mr. Joseph McKim’s little book is, undoubtedly, William the Silent. It is written in the spirited Macaulay style:
Awake, awake, ye burghers brave! shout, shout for joy and sing!
With thirty thousand at his back comes forth your hero King.
Now shake for ever from your necks the servile yoke of Spain,
And raise your arms and end for aye false Alva’s cruel reign.
Ho! Maestricht, Liège, Brussels fair! pour forth your warriors brave,
And join your hands with him who comes your hearths and homes to save.
Some people like this style.
Mrs. Horace Dobell, who has arrived at her seventeenth volume of poetry, seems very angry with everybody, and writes poems to A Human Toad with lurid and mysterious footnotes such as—‘Yet some one, not a friend of --- did! on a certain occasion of a glib utterance of calumnies, by ---! at Hampstead.’ Here indeed is a Soul’s Tragedy.